Freshly Picked: Weekly Link Roundup May 13, 2016

Newsy and Resourceful

Growth Pilots: A Guide To SEM For Startups
“SEM (paid search engine marketing) is easily the most effective paid advertising channel. This is because advertisers can bid on exactly what potential customers are looking for via keywords that represent specific intent.” (read)

Buffer on Medium: 30+ Ultimate Headline Formulas for Tweets, Posts, Articles, and Emails
“On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy.” (read)

UXPin: Web Design Trends 2016: The Definitive Guide
E.g. “Crucial for mobile app design, microinteractions are the minor interactions between bigger interactions, often small enough that users engage them without a second thought.” (read)

Thought-Provoking

Mark Manson: Why You Can’t Trust Yourself
“I’ve hammered on the importance of becoming comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity, in questioning all of your most cherished beliefs and dreams, on practicing skepticism, and doubting everything, most importantly yourself. Throughout these posts, I’ve hinted at the fact that our brains are fundamentally unreliable… But I’ve never given concrete examples or explanations. Well, here they are.”
(read)

Instagram on Medium: Designing a New Look for Instagram, Inspired by the Community
“Brands, logos and products develop deep connections and associations with people, so you don’t just want to change them for the sake of novelty.” (read)

Feedly: It’s not just you: Trends are moving faster than ever
“Ninety percent of the world’s data has been generated in the last two years, according to one study. Google publishes 20 petabytes of information every day, according to Promodo in 2013. To put it in perspective, there have been 5000 petabytes of information created from the dawn of civilization to 2003.” (read)

A Little Levity:)

Phil Cohen (via The Hustle): Death to Death by Meeting
Dropbox engineer, Phil Cohen, has built a Chrome extension that takes each meeting participant’s rough hourly rate and multiplies it by the total scheduled meeting time.
The overall “cost” is shown to everyone on the invite, so you can see if it’s worth getting together. (join the waitlist)